IN 1969 THE BRITISH-GUYANESE painter Frank Bowling curated a show at the art gallery of Stony Brook University that included, along with himself, five African American artists. Bowling had arrived in New York City three years before looking to draw further inspiration from Color Field abstract painters like Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko. Titled “5+1,” the show featured Melvin Edwards, Daniel LaRue Johnson, Al Loving, Jack Whitten, and William T. Williams; Bowling would later recall that his impetus had been to provide “greater exposure for the abstract artists who happened to be Black.” Attracted by the social upheaval and cultural dynamism that marked the United States in the late ’60s, the thirty-two-year-old arrived at a moment when Black artists were gaining some recognition in a largely white art world. His curation of the Stony Brook show was just part of his vigorous engagement with this development: he published numerous essays that argued against the figurative/abstract dichotomy and considered the roles of race and identity in aesthetics, often critiquing “notions of Black Art” that didn’t address “the works themselves.” This volume, published to accompany a current exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, focuses on Bowling’s nine-year sojourn in America and charts the increasing dominance of color and gradual infiltration of abstraction in the canvases of this crucial period.
In his first years in New York, Bowling drew on his Guyanese heritage for a series of works that depicted his mother’s house in British Guiana. Untitled (Mother’s House), 1966, presents a clear silk-screened image of the house and depicts a woman, in front of the structure, emerging from a swirl of color. In successive pieces, Palimpsest I—Mother’s House DarkRedGreen and Mother’s House Overprinted x 3, as the titles indicate, the house is obscured within clouds of color in the former and rendered less legible by duplication in the latter. In the next iteration—Mother’s House on South America, 1968, two years after the first—the house appears only in vague outline, now striated with red, yellow, and orange, and perched above an outline of the southern continent. This Jasper Johns–like manipulation of signs and symbols—particularly the map imagery—mitigates linear progress toward pure abstraction, and predicates Bowling’s early-’70s work, variations on global maps, each one increasingly indistinct, the canvases soaked in distorting waves of vibrant color. The electrified pink that drenches Doughlah G.E.P., 1968–71, named after an especially hot chili pepper, darkens in blocky areas that correspond to the general locations of South America and Africa as well as pictorial elements from previous paintings. Bowling’s revisions of the cartographic motif are totalizing—each version awash in a dramatically different hue, the geographic features waxing and waning in prominence. A sense of contestation over both formal and thematic concerns marks them all: abstraction vies with a plaintive insistence on meaning. This tension perhaps signals Bowling’s own competing emotions about home and migration. Created at a distance from London and Guyana, his paintings give evidence of journeys both aesthetic and spiritual.